How Much Spotify Pays Me for 2 MILLION Streams

In this video, I’ll show you how much money I’ve made from streaming and licensing my music over the last 2 and a half years.

Back Story

So a few things before I dive into the numbers. First, I use the platform Distrokid to distribute my music to Spotify, Apple Music, etc. The plan I have costs $36 per year since I also keep one of my old band’s albums up as well, but if you are just uploading as an individual artist or band, it’s only $20 per year. Either way, it lets you upload unlimited songs and albums, so as far as I know, it’s the best option out there for independent artists to distribute their music.

Second, I license my music through a platform called Artlist. Rachel and I started off as customers, licensing the music on Artlist for our YouTube videos, and eventually, I uploaded my first album as an artist.

One question I get asked often is if you can have your music on streaming services and available for licensing and yes, you can – at least with Artlist. It’s possible other platforms have different agreements, however. Also, a lot of people have reached out to me asking how to get approved as an artist on Artlist after they’ve been rejected the first time – and to be honest, I’m not sure. I think it depends on a variety of factors such as the genre of music, the quality, etc. I’m not familiar with how they decide what gets on the platform and what doesn’t, so unfortunately I don’t have much to offer there.

Next up: I don’t really promote my music at all. When I release a new album, sure I’ll put it on an Instagram story or something, but that doesn’t really drive a ton of traffic. It’s interesting, though – I think having my tracks available for people to use in their videos definitely accounts for a large amount of the streams the tracks have received. Just looking on Apple Music, my tracks have been Shazam’d almost 50,000 times, so I’m thinking they hear the song in a video on YouTube, Shazam it, and then stream it from there.

And lastly, I don’t want this to come across as flexing any time I show revenue or anything like that, rather just a look into what’s possible with music in this digital age.

STREAMING

According to some quick Googling, Spotify pays between 3/10ths and 5/10ths of a cent per stream… which I know a lot of full-time musicians take issue with Spotify and how they pay musicians – especially if you split that revenue with a label, publishing, and other band members. Apple Music says their average pay rate is one cent per stream, which pretty much blows Spotify out of the water, so I’m interested to see how these averages compare to my actual payout and if it’s accurate or not.

I currently have 7 albums slash EPs distributed across streaming platforms, with a total of 50 songs. The last album is from my old band and doesn’t account for much, so I’ll exclude those stats for this video.

My first release, Frames, hit streaming services on May 10th, 2019. This is definitely my most streamed release. The last 365 days this release received 691,000 plays. If we head over to Spotify, we can see this release has 1 million 444 thousand 395 plays. So this album on Spotify clearly accounts for the vast majority of my almost 2 million streams.

Over on Apple Music, this same album has 192,346 streams.

Now let’s go back to Distrokid and look at the earnings. And one thing to note is that these streaming services are usually 2-3 months behind on reporting numbers to Distrokid. So my most-streamed track, Rainy Day, has 870,859 according Distrokid, but it has 855,000 on Spotify and almost 52,000 on Apple Music. This one track has earned me $3,298.96 from streaming alone.

My next most popular song “Just Right” clocked a little over half a million streams and generated $1,788.30 from streaming.

It gets a bit less interesting here on down, since those two are the biggest moneymakers.

There have also been some people actually purchasing my music, which is pretty cool. On Apple Music, I have 365 song purchases and in Distrokid, we can see these listed here.

All-in-all, I have 1,938,308 streams, totalling $7,681.58 cents. But let me subtract my old band’s music from these stats, which doesn’t account for much, and we get a new total of 1,933,833 streams totaling 7,659.34 dollars.

This breaks down to about 4/10ths of a cent per stream.

These tracks have earned $5,086 on Spotify, and $1,308 on Apple Music, and then a little bit from iTunes and YouTube.

So in general, this is about on par with what I expected from my mild Googling, but I had absolutely zero expectations of generating any streaming revenue when I first started uploading my music on Distrokid, and now it brings in $300 to $500 per month.

That’s all pretty cool, but let’s move on to licensing.

LICENSING

The concept of Artlist as a customer is you pay $200 per year and you get unlimited downloads of the songs in their library to use for commercial purposes. They have a video licensing sister site called Artgrid. I explained the breakdown of their payout structure in a past video (here), and it works similarly for music.

Alright, so my first release got onto the Artlist platform in May of 2019. One thing worth mentioning is that with music licensing, I always create as many alternative versions of a track that I can. So, the most obvious example is having an instrumental version in addition to the standard track with vocals. You can also print a version with no lead vocals, maybe no percussion, or just whatever makes sense for your type of music.

With licensing, you never really know what someone may be looking for. Maybe they want the vocals for 5 seconds and then be able to switch to the instrumental version. I know I always look for that when I’m searching out music for different projects, so I try to provide that from the artist side as well. And of course, this also means you can receive more downloads, which usually means more money.

So while I had 50 songs available for streaming, I have over 70 different tracks on Artlist because of these variations.

Alright, so in 2019, my album was up for 6 months and I received 19,586 downloads and got paid $12,888.48.

This equates to roughly 66 cents per download, which is really good.

Knowing that making music was not only fun, but also a good income generator, in 2020, I uploaded a lot more music.

I was hoping to triple my 2019 earnings between the new music and having everything up for a full year, but to be honest, I was a little disappointed. I received 42,946 downloads, which if the 66 cent per download rate continued, that’d pay out over $28,000. But unfortunately, the payout rate was quite a bit lower. Over half.

So in 2020, I earned $18,771.26. That takes the payout rate from 66 cents to 30 cents. This means the number of total downloads Artlist has received has increased a lot more than the amount of paying subscribers. And of course, $18,000 is still good money, but just lower than I expected based off the previous year’s results.

Now for this year, I haven’t uploaded any new tracks, but I have received about 31,000 downloads and we’re 8 months into the year. We can see my downloads have been trending downwards, so my goal will be to get one more release out this year and hopefully break 40,000 downloads this year. Assuming the 30 cents per download rate stays consistent, I’d be able to match last years’ earnings.

Adding it all up

Since 2020 was the first full year of having music up for streaming and licensing, let’s add up the totals.

So we already know that licensing accounted for $18,771.26. Streaming revenue totaled $3,987.83. So in total for 2020, I generated $22,759 and 9 cents from my music, which is close to $1900 per month.

Now altogether over the last two and a half years, I made $31,659 from licensing and $7,659 for a total of $39,318. Definitely not bad for a little side hustle that for me is far more fun than it is work.

Final Thoughts

A lot of people always scoff when I talk about passive income, but between streaming and licensing, this really is about as passive as it gets. Yes, you do the work in creating the music up-front, but after I submit it to Artlist and upload it to Distrokid, I don’t have to do anything else. So to me, that’s about as passive as it gets, and that’s pretty cool.

If you are interested in doing this for yourself, you can check out Artlist or other companies like Epidemic Sound, Musicbed, and SlipStream.

Thank you so much for watching – I hope it shed some light on making money with music. It can be hard to find real numbers when it comes to licensing, so I try to keep things as transparent as possible. Hit the thumbs up button on this video so that good ol’ algorithm will show this video to more people and consider subscribing if you like videos about making money online.

I’ll see you in the next one.